Gay Kiss in ‘Bloody Sunday’ Broke Rules: The Rainer File

Cover art for John Schlesinger's "Sunday Bloody Sunday." The Criterion Collection film is out on DVD and Blu-Ray. Source: Criterion Collection via Bloomberg

Jan. 7 (Bloomberg) -- After John Schlesinger made “Midnight
Cowboy,” which won the Oscar in 1969 for best picture and
director, he had carte blanche to make any film he wanted.

His choice was “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (1971), one of the
most quietly forceful and intelligent movies ever made about the
desolating messiness of adult relationships.

Peter Finch’s Daniel is a London physician, Glenda
Jackson’s Alex, divorced, is an employment counselor, and Bob, a
modernist sculptor played by Murray Head, is the wayward young
man with whom they are both romantically involved.

It’s a movie about the limits of love and compromise: Alex
wants Bob all to herself, while Daniel is content with “half a
loaf.” Bob wants everything and nothing.

Schlesinger, who, like Finch’s character, was both
homosexual and Jewish, was criticized in some gay-lib precincts
for the seediness of the homosexual content in “Midnight
Cowboy,” specifically the scene in which Jon Voight’s hustler is
serviced in a dark movie theater by the student played by Bob
Balaban, and another in which Voight bashes a middle-aged suitor
in a sexual encounter gone wrong.

Guilt Free

Tonally, “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (out on DVD and Blu-Ray
from Criterion) is anything but seedy. It was perhaps the first
Hollywood film to feature homosexuality without wallowing in
guilt, remorse or fear.

The moment when Daniel and Bob casually move into a brief,
passionate kiss is filmed with breathtaking matter-of-factness
(which didn’t prevent the scene from causing a stir at the time
anyway).

Even though the movie is often referred to as a
breakthrough in gay cinema, that designation is too limiting. It
is unapologetically a film about the riven lives of three people
who just happen to be who they are.

Schlesinger certainly had his baroque side, as in parts of
“Midnight Cowboy” and, much more so, in his shrill adaptation of
“Day of the Locust.” But he began his directing career, after
failing as an actor, in documentaries. His best work is
intensely observant and naturalistic and grounded in the bedrock
of strong performance.

Along with “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” I’ve always thought his
best film was the 1983 BBC television drama “An Englishman
Abroad,” written by Alan Bennett and starring Alan Bates as the
spy Guy Burgess. Few scenes in movies are more comically sad
than the one where Burgess, having invited his actress friend
Coral Browne (playing herself) to his Moscow flat, asks her to
measure him for a Savile Row suit.

Best Writers

Schlesinger always had the good sense to reach out to the
best screenwriters when he had an idea for a movie. Besides
being a novelist and short story writer, Penelope Gilliatt, who
wrote “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” had been the film critic in
England for The Observer before alternating with Pauline Kael in
six-month shifts at The New Yorker.

Schlesinger and Gilliatt’s often contentious relationship
resulted in a script so true to its characters that it doesn’t
seem written at all. The one exception is the famous closing
“half a loaf” monologue, spoken by Daniel directly into the
camera. It’s a startling break from the movie’s naturalism and
yet, because we are drawn in so intimately, it seems
shatteringly real.

It’s Finch’s finest moment as an actor (and literally a far
cry from his most famous role as the “mad prophet of the
airwaves” in “Network.”) As for Jackson, she was never better,
more variegated, not even as Queen Elizabeth I in the 1971 BBC
television mini-series.

Gilliatt once wrote that Jackson “was the only Ophelia I
had ever seen who was capable of playing Hamlet.” Why on earth
she gave up acting in 1992 to enter the House of Commons is
beyond me. Just think of all the great performances we’ve been
missing on the floor of Parliament.

(Peter Rainer is a critic for Muse, the arts and leisure
section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own).

Muse highlights include John Mariani on wine and Scott
Reyburn on auctions.